Many of our winners have faced significant challenges in their careers and Ilkim Saracel is no exception. A decade after joining the treasury team at Fortune 500 company Flex with an MBA but almost no work experience in finance, she joined Nextracker with the task of setting up a new treasury team in less than 12 months.

“Nextracker was spinning out of Flex, which was managing Nextracker’s treasury with 20 people across local teams in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, the US, Spain and Australia,” she explains.

Flex had agreed to help Nextracker manage its treasury function for only nine months. In that time she hired the right people, centralised all operations and established the supplier financing, hedging, cash management, bond, bank guarantee and customer credit allocation programmes.

“I implemented technology that allowed me to manage all these processes (including part of the payment operation) with just five people and we won the Adam Smith Award for Harnessing the Power of Technology in treasury,” says Ilkim. “We saved close to a million dollars by automating and centralising all functions and Nextracker’s treasury function is now one of the most successful teams in the company and more advanced than many more mature treasury teams.”

Ilkim joined Nextracker to stand up a fully functioning treasury organisation, observes Ignacio Redondo, SVP of Finance, Nextracker.

“She was able to not only set up processes and systems but also build a high performing team,” he adds. “Her abilities expand throughout all treasury functions. Ilkim clearly exceeded expectations that were already very high and went beyond what was expected.”

The tight deadline imposed by the transition services agreement and the fact that she was an ‘outsider’ having come from Flex demanded some serious negotiation skills.

For example, the AP team was relying on Flex’s treasury function to approve and release payment runs but it was not possible for the new treasury team to take over this process across multiple time zones with the number of people at its disposal.

“I had to reach a middle ground with the AP team, which meant giving them more work,” says Ilkim. “It was a challenge but by providing benchmarking from other companies and giving them clear logic, I persuaded the AP team to take on the talk of initiating and approving payments.”

She attributes these achievements to the belief that with a calm mind and the right team and technology in place, no task is impossible.

“I value my team and show this by praising them publicly, being available and supportive when they need help and living by the culture that I set up,” she says. “We ask the right questions, don’t ignore problems and remain calm. We take decisions that are supported by data. In my first week I made a presentation about our treasury culture to our six-person (including me) team. Companies give cultural presentations, but I haven’t seen this done before within a function or team.”

This approach enabled Ilkim to meet a deadline that another treasurer told her was impossible to achieve successfully.

Dave Bennet, Chief Accounting Officer, Nextracker explains that Ilkim was chosen to lead the treasury migration because she was clearly the best candidate among many interested professionals.

“The investment we made continues to pay dividends,” he says. “We now have a fully integrated TMS that brings all of our 25-plus account statements into one system where we can see collection and payment details by entity, currency and country; allows us to manage payment releases globally from multiple time zones; and enables us to manage exception payments in our ERP.”

This is connected to Nextracker’s TMS to ensure end-to-end encrypted secure payments, which require a system-controlled approval process including voice verification of new bank account details.

Ilkim’s previous achievements at Flex were an indicator of her capacity to effect change. Within her first three months at the company she taught herself AR factoring and started managing the factoring programme in a complex environment where there was no automation.

“Then my manager took two months leave due to poor health and left me with little oversight,” she recalls. “I identified and fixed a major operations issue, which was going to cause us to miss our cash target by US$90m at quarter end and over the following eight months I identified areas of automation, worked with the IT team and built an in-house AR factoring platform.”

Ilkim joined the company’s FX team in 2018 and onboarded Fireapps for FX exposure management. Two years later she moved into cash management and revamped the company’s supply chain financing. Supplier participation increased three-fold to the highest level since the programme was first put in place more than five years earlier, which generated US$60m in free cash flow improvement per quarter.

Ilkim also renewed the asset backed securitisation programme with major improvements to unleash US$25m more quarterly funding.